


Something Like A Soul

by commoncomitatus



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-08
Updated: 2012-09-08
Packaged: 2017-11-13 19:01:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Early S1, shortly after "Elements". Leena contemplates the newest addition to her dysfunctional family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Like A Soul

She moves like poetry.

Not planned poetry, sonnets and couplets with their symmetry and sweeping soft focus, all rhymes and deliberation, mathematics forged into art. No, she moves like freestyle poetry, the kind of poetry that doesn’t rhyme at all, the kind that doesn’t have any rules. She is the kind of poetry that does what it wants and to hell with the consequences, words twisted from the pen at sharp angles, anarchy spilled across the page. It’s the kind of poetry that refuses to define itself as poetry at all, the kind that can’t see beauty in itself, and yet somehow – by accident so much more than intention – still manages, against all the odds, to shape itself into something that’s beyond extraordinary.

Her aura is damaged, its surface rusted and bruise-blackened by misuse and neglect, and it’s not very surprising that that’s all Artie can see in her: the sharp angles of rebellion, anarchy and twisted words. But to someone sensitive to such things, the shimmer of purity beneath the weathered surface – rich as diamond and just as rare – is inescapable.

It draws her in, sweeps her up, holds her fast, a willing captive. It appeals to the deeply-buried corners of her soul (maybe even her heart), the parts of her that have been so long cast aside she can scarcely remember how it felt to have them at all. It sings to her (or tries to), fragmented shards of tuneless lyric crying for a melody to complete them.

The girl is brash, aggressive; if nothing else, Artie is right about that. She thrives on anger, feeds upon it like it’s the only emotion she’s ever known. No, far worse, like it’s the only emotion that’s ever known _her_. She’s all wrapped up in it, tangled and trapped, impotent rage like cloying smoke filling her lungs until she’s suffocating, but she’s too close to realise it’s happening. Leena wants nothing more than to clear the air, to cut the strangling vines of that anger, to teach the wild-eyed young woman what it is to breathe. The potential within her is almost blinding, and Leena can no more ignore it than she could a flashlight shone right into her eyes.

Artie can see it too, she knows, or at least some part of it. For all his resistance, all his too-vocal protestations, she knows better than to think that he would let the girl stick around if he didn’t see something in her that’s worth keeping. Exactly how much he sees, she can’t tell, but that does not matter. She’s staying, at least for now, and that’s enough.

She doesn’t try and reach out... at least, not at first. She wants to (her every instinct is screaming, aching to take that rage-damaged aura and bathe it in warmth and empathy until all of the rust coloured bruises are gone, to cleanse all of the damage until only the diamond remains), but she knows that she can’t. There’s too much anger, too much hurt, too much self-imposed darkness, and she has seen it too many times, in too many places, devouring too many souls. She knows this game far too well: she can’t help until she’s asked.

A few days are doomed to pass before that happens, though, and it’s nothing short of torture for Leena to watch the silent struggles ripple and skitter beneath the surface of her skin, to see the wounds but not be allowed to bandage them. She longs to help. It’s in her nature (no, far more than that; it defines her), and it’s not much consolation at all to remind herself that sometimes the greatest aid is rendered by not offering any. Patience is one of her virtues, but this girl makes it difficult in a way that it hasn’t been for a very long time. And yet, even so, she does what she must, because she knows it has to be this way, and, when the moment does come, it means all the more for having been so painstakingly earned.

It’s three in the morning. Pete and Myka are halfway across the country, chasing artefacts (and, Leena has no doubt, each other). Claudia is awake because she’s afraid, and Leena is awake because the girl’s distress is like a siren in her head. Contrary to common presumption, she doesn’t always need to be in the same room as someone to sense the state of their soul, and Claudia’s is like a radio tower broadcasting the rawest parts of her in static-touched waves.

Still, though the cavalcade of conflict endures for hours, she doesn’t do anything. It’s been this way for the last two nights, but Leena knows that, if she asks, she’ll lose any hope she may have had of forging a rapport, knows that the need for solace will be instantly and irreparably choked by that ever-present anger, soul-cutting and destructive, the well-hidden need to reach out devoured by outrage at the perceived invasion of her personal space. And so, instead, she bides her time, waits and hopes. Uses every ounce of strength she has, wills Claudia to realise that she’s safe here, that she will find no judgement in Leena (for all that her attitude deserves it)... and at last finds herself rewarded.

“Leena? You awake?”

Inside, she smiles, but she makes the effort not to let it touch her face or her voice; any hint that she might have been expecting this could destroy everything the moment promises to become, and so she has to be careful. “Of course,” she says, keeping her tone deliberately ambivalent. “Come in.”

She’s not surprised at all to see the fear overpowered, practically throttled, by the anger. The girl is little more than an exposed nerve, arms folded tight across her chest, protecting her most vulnerable parts, eyes dark-shadowed with the combination of fatigue and the revenant of whatever haunts her dreams, but alight with the spark of rebellion that is all she has left to cling to. If she is going to admit to a need for comfort tonight, the confession will not come easily.

“I’m thirsty,” she announces, as though the situation were entirely Leena’s fault. “And I can’t find your stupid kitchen.”

Leena gives her a guarded smile, still leery of letting too much emotion through to the places Claudia might see. “All right,” she says, and rises with the kind of grace that sparks a flare of jealousy in those anger-touched eyes; she can see the bait, ignores it, presses on with the same careful carelessness. “Come with me. I’ll get you a glass of water.”

“I could get it myself if I knew where the freaking kitchen was...”

“I know,” Leena agrees. “But while I’m up, I could use one too.”

There’s no argument against that, just a petulant little huff and a moodily muttered “whatever...”, but she follows her just the same, and Leena senses the tumult in her abating just a little by the mere presence of someone else with her.

The kitchen is fairly easy to find, but Leena doesn’t point that out. She simply pours a glass of water for each of them, and leans casually against the counter. “Are you settling in okay?”

The girl hisses, feathers ruffled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Leena chuckles, shakes her head just a little. “I’m the proprietor, Claudia. I like to know if my guests need anything.”

The anger sparks. Claudia gestures at the glass, but doesn’t pick it up. “Needed water. Got it. So you can go now.”

“Claudia...”

“What?” It’s probably a good thing she’s not taken the glass yet, because suddenly her fists are balled like iron at her sides, trembling. “You think I need you checking up on me?”

“No,” Leena says, perfectly cool, “I’m not asking because I think you need anything. I’m asking because I’m curious.”

“So go read Wikipedia,” Claudia growls, jaw clenching in time with her shaking fists. “Satisfy your ‘curiosity’ all night.”

She does reach for the glass, then, and Leena knows what’s going to happen before it does. For a heartbeat or two, she thinks of shouting a warning, but she knows it would be fruitless, knows that Claudia will do what Claudia wants, and all the more so if she is told not to. So, instead, she takes a long step backwards and squeezes her eyes closed.

The explosion is almost musical, a symphony of glass-shard violence undercut by a cascade of spilled water; it’s only when the sound dies down, fading away in a flurry of harshly-spat curses, that Leena opens her eyes again, and the myriad colours of Claudia’s aura strike her with the force of a physical blow. She’s a firestorm, alive with pain and fear, anger and humiliation, the whole forming a maelstrom so vividly dizzying that Leena can’t see to the bottom of it.

“Claudia,” she says again, before she can stop herself, and she hears every muscle in the girl’s body going whip-tight.

“Shut up,” she snarls, and drops to her knees, bracing to sweep up the shattered glass with her bare hands, as if that would somehow prove a point. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

“Claudia,” Leena repeats, with more confidence this time because it’s obvious that the girl will do something stupid if she’s not stopped. She takes her by the wrist, pulls her back up to her feet, looks right into her face even as her aura pulses, near-blinding. “Claudia, stop it. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“So what?” she demands. “Why do you even care?” There’s a tremor in the anger now, too, and the white heat of it flickers like a broken television screen; she’s dangerously close to falling apart, and she knows that Leena can see it too. “Scared I’m gonna bleed all over your precious floor?”

“I don’t care about the floor, Claudia,” Leena tells her softly.

“Well, I don’t need you to care about me,” Claudia insists. “So go adopt a kitten or somethin’, ‘cause I’m done with—”

“Claudia,” she urges, and the last hint of the girl’s resolve breaks, shattering like the glass in a shower of aural colour.

She chokes on a final “shut up”, and then she’s down on her knees again, curled in on herself in a futile bid at hiding the sobs that shake through her. For a few moments, Leena can only watch, transfixed in an awestruck kind of way by the colours searing through the cracks in the surface of her damaged aura, the way that even the deepest part of her soul are striving in spite of themselves to break through. It’s a dull ache, the innate need to help drowned out just briefly by the throbbing pulse of pure empathy, and for the handful of heartbeats before she is able to pull it apart and find herself within it, she’s lost, lost to the diamond-edged beauty, the richness and the rareness that she’s known from the start were hidden just beneath the rusted surface.

It gives her strength, seeing it, finding herself blinded and trapped within it, even as it hurts. It reminds her why she’s here, why Claudia is here, shines sunlight down on all the shadow-darkened corners of the girl’s soul, the parts of her that nobody else will ever see, magnifies it all until even Artie could have seen them if only he’d open himself up to try.

But he never will. And even if he could, he’s not here. Nobody is here. Only Leena. Leena with her sixth sense and her unique powers of observation. Just her, Leena, and that breathtaking aura, the one that everyone can sense but nobody except her can see. She, with the parts of her that can see, that can always see the things nobody else can, connected now on a deeper-than-flesh level with the parts of Claudia that are breaking – breaking open and breaking down and breaking apart, breaking (most of all) into countless glittering shards of something that is not quite glass but not truly diamond yet either. And it’s all for her, just her, and it is an honour and a privilege and a tragedy, and all at once, but there is nobody else, and there never will be.

And so, because she is all there is, because there’s nobody else to see this, because nobody else can see this, even when it’s right before their eyes, Leena takes it as the gift it is, the gift that’s been within her for as long as she can remember. She takes Claudia, too, with her damaged aura, the rust-coloured bruises mottling over those dazzling diamond colours, the self-inflicted wounds bearing down on a soul that wants nothing more than to fly and be free, to see the world and be a part of it, to find a place and a home. Leena takes it in, takes the girl in – into her arms, into her heart, as far in as she can, as deeply as Claudia is willing to be taken (which is not very, because she’s still afraid and this place isn’t her home just yet). She takes her in, all of her, and holds her until the sobbing quiets and the only sound left is the crunch of splintered glass beneath them.

When she’s done, when the shaking stops as well as the tears, Claudia looks up. Her eyes are rimmed with red, but her edges are softer, the anger dissipated (though whether it’s a product of exhaustion or of healing, it is too early for Leena to discern), and in its place a tranquillity that is beautiful. It steals her breath, renders her incapable of speech; if only for a moment, the rust and the damage seem to be stripped away, and only the sunshine-touched diamond remain, sparkling and ethereal, visible to nobody but her.

“Still don’t need you,” Claudia manages at last; her voice is hoarse and rough, but her soul resonates clear as crystal.

“I know,” Leena says; now isn’t the time to argue that point, even if she wanted to. “But you’ve got me just the same.”


End file.
